More layoffs at Amazon. Pink Slips went out Wednesday to the first of 9,000 employees who were told just last month their jobs were in jeopardy.
“Amazon was the tech company that expanded the most during the pandemic” says Professor John Logan, the director of Labor and Employment studies at San Francisco State University, “In a way we would expect some kind of readjustment.”
In January, Amazon announced it was laying off 18,000 workers worldwide in 2023; but last months’ news pushes that total number to 27,000.
The job cuts on Wednesday came in web services, human resources, e-commerce, advertising & Twitch. “Cloud services has been Amazon’s most profitable division for years and years” but layoffs in Amazon’s IT Service Management Company AWS took Logan by surprise “This is a readjustment that’s taking place throughout the entire sector and we don’t know if it’s over yet, there could be more rounds of layoffs.”
It’s not clear yet how these layoffs are going to impact the Seattle area or what deeper meaning the economy is sending.
“The FED, they’re not acting like we’re in a recession at all” that was Silicon Valley high tech observer Rob Enderle last week following jobs cuts at Meta “And the jobs numbers remain so good; typically when you fall into a recession you have high unemployment and we don’t have that.”
But, it depends on who you ask “Economists tend to worry a significant number of layoffs like this” Logan is more pessimistic “Often means layoffs throughout the economy on a much larger scale, 6 or 9 months down the line.”
That raises the stakes for some cities more than others “It’s also worrying for cities like Seattle and San Francisco” Logan cautions because “(they) tied their prosperity to how well the tech industry is doing.”
But, even with high tech layoffs mounting there are still more jobs than people to fill them.
The 27,000 job cuts at Amazon account for 8% of its 350,000 member workforce worldwide.